REFLECTION
In the off-season during my playing days, we would often times take trips to Costa Rica for vacation. I learned to surf there, and fell in love with it. The first time I successfully dropped into a wave, I felt this effortless sensation I’d never really experienced anywhere else. I was fully in the moment, at one with the water, living in the present, all five of my senses engaged—hearing, seeing, smelling, feeling, tasting the salt sea spray. I was out of my head and fully in my body, not thinking about anything. My senses were completely alive.
Surfing is a sport and an art and a meditative practice, in that way. It’s also a puzzle to be solved, a process to be mastered. You don’t just grab a board, practice popping up a few times, and start shredding twelve-footers on day one. Still, like a lot of my hobbies and professional pursuits, I attacked it with enthusiasm, energy, and effort.
The ocean humbled me very quickly.
What I got wrong in the beginning, was that I’d head to the beach, then dive straight into the water and start paddling out. More often than not, I found myself fighting through the whitewash of crashing waves just to get out to the lineup. Once I finally got out there, I’d be exhausted. I’d used most of my energy just to get to the place where the surfing began.
Waves, I soon learned, come in sets. 4, 6, 8, 10 at a time. They break one after the other after the other. When the last wave in a set breaks and washes out, the water calms down for a period, making it easier to paddle out. I noticed the locals and the really good surfers never did what I did. When they got to the beach they sat down and watched the ocean for a while. Then they devised a game plan. They counted the number of waves in a set, which don’t change very often. They identified the direction of the break—left or right. They figured out the best place to enter the water and paddle out. Only then, with the full picture etched in their minds, would they get up and head to the shoreline.
These surfers didn’t fight the ocean. They developed a strategy that minimized wasted energy and maximized wave-riding opportunities. They traded a little bit of time on the sand for a lot more time in the water. They surfed smarter not harder, in other words.
It’s a useful metaphor for life.
LESSON
Imagine doing what I did when I started surfing, diving blindly into the water at the beginning of an eight-wave set. You start paddling through the whitewash of the first broken wave, then comes the second wave and boom it crashes on top of you. You get tussled and tossed around a bit, then spend a bunch of energy quickly getting yourself back on the board and pointed in the right direction.
Just as you recover, the third wave comes and boom, it swamps you under before you’ve fully caught your breath. Now you’re disoriented, tired, and short of breath, and you’re swimming just to maintain your position.
Boom, the fourth wave comes in. It surprises you and drags you across the bottom. Now you’re scraped and bruised, and you still haven’t gotten anywhere.
Fifth wave, boom. Sixth wave, boom.
You’ve been paddling for barely a minute or two at this point, but it feels like an eternity. You’re completely exhausted. You’ve expended all your energy just trying to recover and not lose ground in the water. Without a super human effort, a tow, or some good luck, when waves seven and eight roll in, that’s when you’re really toast and you find yourself getting knocked back all the way to shore with nothing to show for all your effort.
Now, replace the ocean and your surfboard with the marketplace and a new product that you’ve created. Or with a locker room and your new “system.” Or with parenthood and the way you relate to your kids.
History is littered with broke entrepreneurs, fired coaches, and estranged parents who meant well but didn’t do their homework. Who rushed in without taking the time to see the bigger picture first and got the shit kicked out of them as a result. Mother Nature, the market, the locker room, kids—they don’t really care how much you want something, or how hard you’ve worked on it. Enthusiasm and effort only get you so far when you don’t consider your environment first.
The world has its own ideas. Life has its own rhythms. They have nothing to do with what you want. They’re going to do what they do. Again and again and again, like the waves in a set. If you resist that truth, if you persist, it will toss you around like a rag doll and grind you up…until you learn your lesson.
APPLICATION
It didn’t take me very long to learn this lesson on the beaches of Costa Rica. As a quarterback my job was all about study and preparation. Reading defenses, letting plays develop, anticipating, then acting.
One of the cardinal sins of the quarterback position is holding the ball too long and taking unnecessary hits. Not only do you take physical punishment when that happens, you get set backwards, like getting caught in a set, and it makes it harder to advance the ball toward your end zone. But rushing throws can also be bad. The goal with each snap is to identify the best option within the rhythm of the play, of the series, of the entire game really, and then to get the ball out on time.
Timing was just as important with my broadcasting career. I knew I was going into the booth after I retired, and conceivably I could have started right away, but I took a year. I talked to 30 or 40 people in the broadcasting world. I got a ton of good advice and absorbed a lot of great wisdom. That season, I tried to watch games not through the eyes of a quarterback, which is what I was used to, but through the lens of a broadcaster. What were they seeing? Who were they looking at? What information were they trying to convey? That year on the couch, in conversation, was the broadcasting version of sitting on the beach watching the waves break.
That didn’t mean I would be perfect right away, or even great for that matter. Things never go perfectly, no matter how much you prepare. You won’t always nail the call or have the chance to get the ball out on time, metaphorically speaking. But you will have your opportunity to get in the game, to make a call or to make a play that changes everything. You just won’t always know when that opportunity is going to come, or what it looks like.
What surfing teaches you is how to identify the factors that create opportunity. It teaches you to sit back at first, to be observant and patient. This is how you prepare for the moment that opportunity arrives, so when it comes there’s very little wasted effort getting out there and you have enough energy to be successful at whatever you’re trying to accomplish.
In business that can mean understanding the competitive landscape and being clear-headed about the total addressable market or your product market fit. Maybe the market isn’t ready for you, maybe you’re not ready for the market. Maybe it’s just a matter of time, or maybe this break isn’t right for you, and you need to pivot to a new stretch of beach, a different patch of blue ocean.
The same can be said for relationships of all kinds. Rushing into a new romance can feel like love bombing. Rushing in to help your kids can feel like snowplowing. Rushing in to fix problems with your team can feel like micromanaging. When that happens, no amount of effort or best intentions will cut through the waves of resistance you meet.
Someone said to me recently, “patience equals peace.” I’d just gotten back from that insane ten-day busy stretch I talked about a few weeks ago. It was a beautiful sentiment, and a perfect reminder. Sometimes, you just have to wait for the energy to be right. You have to be willing to go with the flow for a while. You need to be comfortable doing nothing, while watching everything.
This can be hard for the grinders and the hustlers, who often mistake activity for achievement. But if you have the wrong strategy or the wrong tactics, or bad timing, life can sometimes feel like a big waste of energy. You work so hard, you care so much, you exhaust yourself in service to a mission, or a business, or a relationship, and yet you find yourself spit out back onto the beach by Mother Nature, depleted, confused, and maybe a little bitter because you never got to the place you were trying to reach. You never even got up on the board.
In surfing, a successful day ends by walking out of the ocean with your board under your arm, tired yet content with the work you put in on the water and the progress you made on the board. But make no mistake, that work started in the sand. Listening, watching, learning and waiting for the waters to work for you.
